We might be surprised to read a poem resigned to the
impossibility of liberating black life from the “white shadows”
written by Langston Hughes who, just five years earlier, penned his
essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In “The Negro
Artist,” considered by Arnold Rampersad to be “the finest essay of
Hughes’s life” (Volume I 130), Hughes takes on
the role of spokesman for the younger generation of artists who
formed the core of the New Negro Movement, popularly referred to as
the Harlem Renaissance, and boldly asserts their intention to
develop a black aesthetic free of white
influence.1 He develops the metaphor of the
mountain to represent this influence—“this is the mountain standing
in the way of any true Negro art in America—this urge within the
race toward whiteness” (27)—and insists that only by reaching the
mountain’s summit can black artists be “free within ourselves”
(29).

The profound distinction between these words of optimism and the
sense of resignation and defeat in “House in the World” (1931)
reveals perhaps the greatest struggle to emerge from the New Negro
Movement: how to effect a black aesthetic within an
environment largely monitored and controlled by whites. As Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. observes, “New Negro” was intended to signal the
formation of a “cleared space” for a “spontaneously generated black
and sufficient self,” but as he also suggests, such a project was
undermined by the pervasiveness of white influence that stood as an
obstacle to any truly independent black creative sphere (“Trope”
132). In The New Negro (1925), arguably the
seminal text of the movement, Alain Locke expresses his optimism
that this influence can be overcome. With a renewed
self-dependence, he says, the black community is “bound to enter a
new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for
whatever pressure there may be of conditions from without” (4). For
Locke and many other artists, one of the keys to breaking free of
the “conditions from without” was creating an aesthetic based on
black vernacular forms, with a particular emphasis on music. In
“The Negro Artist,” Hughes represents the ascent to the mountaintop
in terms of a descent, describing the need for black
artists to revisit the subterranean world of the “low-down folks,”
the common people who “are not afraid of spirituals” and act as if
“jazz is their child” (28).2 Whether it is the
metaphor of the mountaintop or the underground, Hughes depicts the
independent space that will allow black artists to create and
perform beyond the “white shadows.”

The bold vision for a black “cleared space” articulated in “The
Negro Artist” finds its statement and its counterstatement in the
eight lines of “House in the World.” Drawing on spatial metaphors,
Hughes juxtaposes a house with the vast expanse of the world. In
doing so, he emphasizes the wide disparity between the space that
blacks hope to attain (a mere house) and what whites already
control; by choosing an enclosed structure to represent that space,
he also hints at the insularity that Harlem Renaissance authors
tried to effect in their pursuit of a uniquely black aesthetic.
This insularity is further reinforced by the disappearance of
the world and the repetition of house in
the second stanza, symbolically representing the constricting
universe of the poem, which we also see when the speaker narrows
his intended audience from an unspecified reader (implying a
universality) to “[d]ark brothers” in particular. Ultimately,
however, the poem’s compression—reinforced visually as the second
stanza narrows to the poem’s shortest line—suggests the futility of
ever carving out a “cleared space,” as even the smallest black
spaces are haunted by the white shadows. Notably, the longest line
in the poem, which casts a metaphorical shadow over the rest of the
poem, contains the only reference to whiteness, thus echoing the
deep pessimism within the poem that the “[d]ark brothers” will ever
find their own house in the...

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